You Can’t Go Home Again--Not in High-Tech America

“Are you sure you know where you’re going?” my wife asks. It is not so much a question as it is her gentle way of telling me that it is very late at night, that the temperature is well below freezing and the heater in our truck is not working, so this is not the time to start any nostalgic wanderings about the hinterlands of New Jersey.

“For crying out loud,” I say. “I lived here for 25 years. Of course I know where I’m going!”

After a while she says, “I don’t remember this road . . . or all these buildings.”

Well, she wouldn’t. She’s from California and only an occasional visitor to this place. But I don’t remember this road, either. I have been navigating by intuition, not by landmarks. The fields and woods I used to know all seem to be sprouting big corporate research centers. The engines of progress have been running hard while I was gone.

Still, when we finally arrive in the little town I grew up in, nothing seems to have changed. The word “historic” has been added above the town water tower, and there is a new sign by the firehouse to inform passersby that Washington’s army once encamped here. That is all that is different.

The next day I discover that there has been change here after all, only it is very subtle. Houses that always needed paint, don’t. Backyards that should be full of junked cars, aren’t. I walk down the back street (there is only one back street), and then down Main. I recognize no one, and no one recognizes me. Then it dawns on me what has changed--the people.

“I don’t think any of the kids you grew up with stayed here,” my father acknowledges. “They couldn’t afford it. We are slowly but surely being gentrified.” He stands there for a minute, and then puts on his coat and walks to the door. “Come on. I want to show you something.”

We drive down Main Street and turn left toward Princeton. We are driving past new houses. New big and expensive houses--$250,000 a crack. A few miles farther on, the big houses have become big apartment complexes. The road grows two lanes wider, and now it’s glass-and-concrete office buildings squatting behind vast manicured lawns.

“What is all this?” I ask, and my father recites the litany of who’s who in high tech. He turns back for home on a different road, and the same scenes repeat themselves. Central Jersey is growing as fast as or faster than Orange County.

Later in the day I sit at the kitchen table with the newspaper classified section. I scan it with a curiosity that soon turns to shock. My father sees what I am doing and says quietly, “There’s going to be something like 40,000 new jobs around here in the next few years.”

“Doing what?” I, the machinist, ask. “Pushing paper?” I can feel my Luddite streak suddenly growing wider.

“Yeah,” he agrees, “they’ll all be for paper-pushers.”

“Just swell. What about all the blue-collar slobs like me? “What the hell are they going to do?”

He doesn’t answer right away. Then he says, “You can find your kind of work around here.” There is a long pause before he adds, “Somewhere.”

I’ve just been through all the ads, and there is no somewhere. Anyway, you can’t move into this neighborhood anymore on a machinist’s wages.

I live in Orange County only because one afternoon 15 years ago, for no particular reason, I pointed my pickup truck west on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. I’ve always had the idea in the back of my mind that I would go back to Jersey someday, but I can’t really complain about life in California. I have a job, the sun shines every day and life is easy. Maybe too easy. Sometimes I feel a need to stand in a New Jersey potato field under a cold winter rain and taste the misery of Northeastern winters. But the potato fields are all turning into sanctuaries for the acolytes of high tech, succumbing to a new economic order that I am not suited for by either education or temperament.

I realize that progress wasn’t going to grind to a halt while I was gone. Nevertheless, when confronted with the citadels of the new post-industrial America, I have the vague sensation of having been violated--personally. I feel like a stranger in my homeland. An obsolete stranger.

And it is not just the radical changes that bother me. It is also a couple of assumptions that America is carrying into the future--mostly the assumption that we have emerged from a socioeconomic chrysalis as a post-industrial butterfly. Conventional wisdom seems to be that this country has lost the prime requisite for the factory order--a servile and dirt-cheap supply of labor. So whatever (if anything) is being designed in all those new clean-tech buildings will be built in some under-developed industrial terror state like South Korea--or South Carolina.

There is big money to be made, but it is a game of beggar-thy-neighbor. The first victim is the American working class. The second victim is the class of people--Third World peasantry or second-class Americans--too ignorant or desperate to resist the deprivations of the new industrial revolution.

And after everybody has been priced out of post-industrial America, what happens then? We may discover, like all the kids in my hometown who could not afford to stay, that we also have been playing beggar ourselves.

If that is how it turns out, we will all have a lot of time to stand in the winter rain. And none of the roads home will be where we last saw them.